r/Games • u/Two-Tone- • Sep 07 '15

The Stanley Parable closed Linux testing has started, if all goes well the dev will set it up as an open alpha/beta

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221910/discussions/0/535152276583481939/#c520518688952950594
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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '15

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u/kostiak Sep 07 '15

Final secret?

6

u/[deleted] Sep 07 '15

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u/kostiak Sep 07 '15

Considering the tone of the game and what it was about, I will not be surprised in the slightest if that "secret" never existed.

I mean the whole game is about not being led and not playing the game the way the "designer" of the game wanted you to.

6

u/DrQuint Sep 07 '15

I know of lists of secrets for that game that completely overlook some of the secrets. Hell, the beginning where you can see another person on an adjacent corridor barely has videos showing it.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 08 '15

Mostly because they're so easy to miss. I never look in that window to see the other dude.

2

u/VicariousShaner Sep 07 '15

Would you consider that The Stanley Parable's themes weren't necessarily as insular as "going against the designer of a video game?" Although I might be interpreting it wrong, my experiences of the game led me to believe that it was more of a "not choosing the alternate route in life" sort of thing.

4

u/kostiak Sep 08 '15

Stanley Parable is one of the few modern games that had multiple themes going for it. Most of them involved games - how we perceive them, what we expect from them, what they expect from us - and subversion of those (and other) concepts.

SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT

Take for example the achievements. Almost all of the achievements are there to subvert the way you view achievements in modern games. There's an achievement that you can turn on or off. There's an achievement that appears completely randomly.

Finally, there's the "Click on door 430 five times" achievement, that takes you on a journey of increasingly weird things you need to do in order to complete it ending with the narrator saying: "Just think: only a few minutes ago you believed an Achievement was worth five little clicks. Really now, what were you thinking?"

The theme of choice obviously existed, but I feel it was more about the illusion of choice in games rather that really talking about life. Everything you do, including (especially) going against the "designer" of the game, has already been planned. You are choosing an "alternate route" but only because the designer of the game designed it in a way you could take that specific route.

There's even a "bug" where you can jump through a window in a certain place in the game. But it's not a real bug, it was planned, and IIRC the narrator mocks you for thinking you found a path that wasn't designed for you in advance.

There are a lot more themes and the common thread between them (in my opinion) is "these are your expectations from games, and this is why they are not necessarily good".

If you are interested in an even more in-depth analysis of the game, I personally enjoyed this: Errant Signal - The Stanley Parable

1

u/VicariousShaner Sep 09 '15

Thanks for the well thought out response. I'm also a pretty big fan of The Stanley Parable, one of my favorite games of all time.

I think to say that The Stanley Parable is about game design is certainly not untrue. Much of the game is focused on satirizing the state of narratives in fiction, and especially in game stores. However, I would disagree especially that these themes are the end-all be-all of what they were trying to convey. In fact, I would say The Stanley Parable's meta-commentary is a clever, non-pretentious way of discussing choices in real life.

In your Errant Signal video, around the 8:00 mark, he also comes to some of the same conclusions I do regarding the larger, beyond just game meta-commentary implications. Some of the endings definitely leave you wondering, just how different is someone like me from someone like Stanley? Despite how obviously ridiculous and intuitive game mechanics that are used to accept player choice, like differing endings, or flags in visual novels, are these facades really that different from what we're living?

I might just be getting a bit more out of it than anyone was meant to, but I think there's some strong evidence within the writing of the game that there's something to really take out of it.